charlie,
switchover is how oracle recommends you do maintenance to a 24x7
database. BUT it's curious that oracle also says when doing a switchover
to make sure no users are connected to either database (crazy). although
i've only done this in a test environment, my guess is if your system is
24x7, better do your switchover when the activity is at its lowest and
your DNS entry can quickly change to reflect the new server location. if
your network has a long delay before the DNS change propagates
completely and you're 24x7, don't do a switchover(assuming standby and
primary are on different servers). otherwise, when done with whatever
you are doing and before the switchover back to your former primary, do
a log switch and have it apply to the former primary/new standby.

if all of this is during expected downtime, you're in the clear.
switchover back and forth all you want, nothing will adversely affect
your primary. Any DML to either system will be lost if you don't do a
log apply BEFORE a switchover.

depending on what updating you will be doing on your primary, you may
NOT have to rebuild the standby. Oracle CPU and upgrade patches don't
require standby rebuilds. We also did a kernel upgrade and did not have
to rebuild.

so now, my question: since your physical is an exact duplicate of your
primary, why wouldn't your app work on the standby just as it does on
the primary? same data structure, same version, same environment
variables. if it's a lesser machine, then you'll want to know throughput
and capacity limits, not if the app will work or not. right?





On 2/27/2006 2:50 PM, Charlie Azzopardi wrote:

> Hello All,
>
> We are using Oracle Dataguard with our 9i database. Our standby server is a
> physical standby in maximum performance mode.
> I want to do a graceful failover to change the standby database and make it
> the primary. We want to test to ensure that our SAP
> application will run on the standby server.
>
> We will be updating the database, so I know that I will have to rebuild the
> standby database
> once the testing is completed.
>
> Will this have any adverse effect on the "real" primary server ?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Charlie Azzopardi
> Database Administrator
> Parmalat Canada
> 416-620-3020
>
>
>
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